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New Delhi: Over 70% of women in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai are not visible on the cities’ streets, a study on gender disparities in public spaces has found. The study, conducted by researchers Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra and Gaurav Sood, is based on a visual audit of over 900 kms of roads in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai region.

The study found that women accounted for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai. In terms of sex ratios, women accounted for 239 (Mumbai) and 223 (Navi Mumbai) pedestrians per 1,000 men. These numbers are far below women’s population share in the two cities. The residential census ratio of women is 838 and 910 per 1,000 men in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai respectively.

The study relied on a visual audit of the roads based on 4000 street images that were manually annotated. Trained human annotators – who reviewed photos and assigned necessary labels in the images – classified over 23,000 visible individual observations, recording gender*, transport mode, and streetscape features such as vendor presence, street markings, and road surface quality, the study said.

The pattern was consistent irrespective of road types –  primary, secondary, tertiary, and residential – with women’s share being low on all of them, the study found.

The study also made a distinction between women’s share in pedestrian and vehicular traffic. When restricted to pedestrians, women constitute 19.3% of people on Mumbai roads and 18.2% in Navi Mumbai. On the other hand, women constituted just 8.4% of two-wheeler users in Mumbai and 5.7% in Navi Mumbai – significantly lower than their pedestrian counterparts.

The researchers, while admitting the limitations of the study, said that women travelling inside enclosed vehicles like cars and public transport like buses and urban rail could not be counted as they weren’t visible in the gathered images. 

While the study does not comment on why we lack female presence on roads, the researchers noted the implications of this observation. “When women cannot move freely in a city, the consequences can ripple through labor markets, civic life, and household bargaining. Urban streets are where these constraints become physically visible: a space can be crowded and still exclusionary if the crowd is overwhelmingly male,” the study noted.

“Cultural and societal norms that treat unaccompanied female presence in public as suspicious........

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